Bad Medicine

A glance at the cast list for the new Sidney Lumet hospital drama Critical Care might lead you to expect an embarrassment of riches. Instead, the results are often just plain embarrassing. How could a film starring James Spader, Helen Mirren, Albert Brooks, Kyra Sedgwick, Anne Bancroft, Jeffrey Wright, Wallace Shawn, Philip Bosco and Edward Herrmann be this juiceless?

Lumet has a reputation as an actor's director. Despite an ample array of bad performances in his oeuvre, he's elicited some of the most powerful pieces of acting in American movies--including Katharine Hepburn and the rest of the ensemble in A Long Day's Journey Into Night, Rod Steiger and Juano Hernandez in The Pawnbroker, and Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon. Actors want to work with Lumet for the same reason they want to work with Woody Allen--unlike most directors, he gives them the rehearsal time to create a character.

Also like Allen, Lumet gets major actors to work for a fraction of their usual fee, and often in small roles. For performers who still believe that the stage, not the screen, is the ultimate crucible, Lumet's actor-centric approach to rehearsal and filming provides the illusion that one is working in the "higher" realm of the theater.

But all this freedom to explore pays off only if there's something worth exploring. As Lumet himself has discussed in interviews, a great actor isn't "great" in a vacuum; first there must be a great role. And the roles in Critical Care, as adapted by TV producer-turned-screenwriter Stephen Schwartz from a novel by Richard Dooling, are dim. Lumet and Schwartz are trying for a black comedy about the health-care system, and God knows there's enough mate-rial out there for the blackest of jests. Why didn't more of it get into this movie?

Critical Care wants to do to medicine what Lumet's Network did to TV--which no doubt is why Lumet was attracted to Schwartz's material. Paddy Chayefsky's Network script was a yowly sermon that often utilized the underhanded TV tactics it ostensibly condemned. But the film had a shlocky, knockabout force; it was one of those show-biz love-hate valentines that "exposed" what already was very much in plain view.

With Network clearly in mind--and probably Chayefsky's script for Arthur Hiller's The Hospital, too--Schwartz has chosen to mimic the screenwriter's soggy, sermonizing side and leave out the giddy bluster. A sickly self-righteousness comes through, and no more so than in the character of Dr. Werner Ernst (James Spader), the big-city hospital resident who agonizingly climbs to glory. Tending to a "vegetative" patient, Werner finds himself caught between the warring claims of the patient's two daughters, Connie (Margo Martindale), a holy roller who wants to keep the expensive life supports on, and Felicia (Sedgwick), who wants them off.

When it turns out that the dispute hinges not on quality of life but quantity of inheritance, Werner must choose between being a good doctor or the kind who cares about his patients only if they come equipped with hefty insurance premiums. Care to guess what happens? Worse than being able to predict everything is the glib and self-serving way in which the predictions are fulfilled.

Spader, along with the other actors, must have thought that this pap is what Oscars are made of. And sometimes it is. But to be truly Oscar-worthy, this stuff needs a phony-baloney grandiloquence--the sort of thing Chayefsky supplied in his Oscar-copping Network screenplay. Schwartz's grandstanding is so tepid, he wouldn't rate a Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, let alone an Oscar.

Lumet and his production team have designed the intensive-care unit to resemble the interiors in 2001 and THX 1138. The state-of-the-art antisepticness is meant to reinforce the idea that modern medicine is very good at keeping you alive--as long as your insurance holds out.

But there's something else going on here: The filmmakers seem antagonistic to the methods of science itself. The character played by Philip Bosco is a cutting-edge critical-care researcher, but he's portrayed as a martinet. His space-age work is presented as soulless mumbo jumbo--a way of distancing the doctor from the patient. With so many good examples of bad medicine at the filmmakers' disposal, why stoop to this airhead Luddism? It makes about as much sense to attack the "soulless" technology of modern medicine as it does to attack the advanced techno-gizmos of modern moviemaking. It's not the technology that's the problem; it's the technocrats. Even Paddy Chayefsky could have told you that.

As an indication of how back-asswards this movie is, the only character who comes across with any heft is Albert Brooks's Dr. Butz, a boozy geezer who once pioneered critical-care management but now, shunted aside, cares only about racking up numbers. He's a new-style villain: the managed-care ogre. And yet Brooks has so much fun with the character that Butz ends up being the hero. His venality shines brighter than Werner's righteousness. You can't take anything Brooks does seriously here--never was an actor less suited to playing an old fart. But Brooks in his other movies is so good at playing a middle-aged fart that his role here seems prescient. It's a peek into Brooks's crusty, cigar-chomping comic future.

Critical Care appears on the scene at a time when such TV shows as ER and Chicago Hope have already overkilled this good medicine/bad medicine stuff. Schwartz, who has produced for television's American Playhouse and the Discovery Channel, may think he's moving up in the world by carrying the torch into movie theaters. The theaters running this film, though, are likely to be empty. What Critical Care resembles isn't the current TV hospital dramas but something far less entertaining. It's like a boring, schematic Golden Age of Television problem drama. Isn't this the very thing that, forty years ago, Sidney Lumet graduated into movies to get away from?